Pentagon OK With Congressional RRW Demands, Tauscher says

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The chairwoman of the House committee that sets funding for the nation’s nuclear weapons complex said yesterday that the Defense and Energy departments have accepted boundaries set by Congress on development of a new U.S. nuclear warhead (see GSN, March 5).

The Reliable Replacement Warhead, as administration officials have dubbed it, is a bid to replace Cold War-era warheads with a new design that would be easier to maintain, more reliable and cheaper to produce.

The U.S. military during the Cold War designed and built warheads that packed the maximum explosive force into the smallest space, all the better to fit more warheads onto the tip of a single missile.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, needs changed and officials began to pursue a warhead more like a pickup truck than a Formula One racer, a weapon that would be more robust and require less maintenance.

Lawmakers required that the Defense and Energy departments respect a number of important “fences” while developing the new warhead, Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), head of the House Armed Forces Strategic Forces Subcommittee, said yesterday during a breakfast meeting with reporters.

The weapon must have the same yield as the old warheads it is slated to replace; it must be able to be certified without explosive nuclear testing; it must enable a drawn down of the U.S. stockpile of surplus warheads held as a hedge against a failure of any one weapon system; and it must make “the client, the military feel confident,” Tauscher said.

“Those fences have not only worked but they’ve held,” she said yesterday.

The RRW program remains in its early design and engineering phase, but Tauscher said over the past three years of discussions about the new warhead “the foes have diminished and the fans have increased.”

Still, as Congress worked on a number of authorization and appropriation bills that control funding for the program in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, lawmakers expressed some significant misgivings with U.S. nuclear policy, calling for a re-evaluation of the nation’s strategy.

The House has called for a “blue-ribbon panel,” as Tauscher put it, to evaluate how many nuclear warheads the nation needs for its strategic ends, while the Senate pressed for an accelerated Nuclear Posture Review to be conducted by the next presidential administration in 2009 (see GSN, Aug. 2).

“We’ve married those two together.  We think that they are very congruent.  We think they complement each other,” Tauscher said.

Describing a comfortable understanding with the current administration representatives regarding RRW project restrictions, she said, “I not only have a handshake with DOD I have a handshake with [the National Nuclear Security Administration].”

The National Nuclear Security Administration is a semiautonomous body within the Energy Department that is helming the development of the Reliable Replacement Warhead.

Still, the congressional approach is one of caution, Tauscher said.  “We’ve said let’s walk before we run.  Let’s really understand this.”

The House and the Senate have proposed differing levels of budget cuts to the president’s $88.8 RRW fiscal 2008 request.  The proposed Senate budget bill trims funding while a House version cuts it entirely (see GSN, May 24).

“Part of the strategic pause is to get the language right.  Part of it is to get the commitment right.  Part of it is also that we have a new secretary of defense, Bob Gates, who I’m happy to say is very cooperative, very easy to deal with very accessible,” she said.  “I’m much happier to have him talking about these issues than I was Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld and some of the other people who were in the administration who would have put nuclear tips on ice cream cones I think if we had let them.”

Ultimately, it is critical that the program allows the United States to back off its Stockpile Stewardship program, a costly effort to maintain the current stockpile of older warheads, she said.  “There’s no reason to expend the money that we are spending on RRW if it doesn’t achieve for us the end game, which is to effectively take our foot off the life extension programs.”

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